Alan Newhouse, co-founder of Community Sailing, gone at 88

Friday

Alan Newhouse’s friendship transcended age. It didn’t matter how old you were. If you were Alan’s friend, age was just a number, his many friends remembered this week.

Newhouse, a life-long sailor and co-founder of Nantucket Community Sailing, died last Wednesday at his winter home in Vero Beach, Fla. He was 88.

“Sometimes he felt like my grandfather, sometimes he felt like my father, but all the time he felt like my best friend,” said Nantucket Island Community Sailing president Alan Worden, who crewed with Newhouse on numerous occasions. “Age didn’t matter. You just wanted to spend time with him.”

Nick Judson, Community Sailing’s executive director, agreed.

“His spirit more than anything else will leave a huge legacy. To me, that’s what separated him, his ability to rally people around something, to go out and get something done. It could be something as simple as the dirty job of getting people to go out and paint boats, getting people to support a regatta, or go to a party. He had an incredible knack for finding a way to get people to come together. He was a wonderful fun spirit. He made everything fun. He was always so positive.”

Newhouse was perhaps best known for his tireless work over the past two decades restoring the island’s Rainbow Fleet and Indian-class sailboats and revitalizing interest in their use for both recreation and racing.

In the late 1970s, Newhouse set his sights on restoring the Rainbows, the small catboats with brightly-colored sails made famous by the Marshall Gardiner photograph of them rounding Brant Point in 1930. By the 1970s, most of the Rainbows on Nantucket had fallen into disrepair and were no longer being used, so Newhouse went around the island buying them up, repairing them, and then selling them to people who promised to race and take care of them.

For years after, Newhouse led a fleet of 25-30 Rainbows around Brant Point every year in August during the Rainbow Parade that kicks off the Opera House Cup wooden sailboat race.

Newhouse next took aim at the Indians, the first type of sailboat he owned as a child. In 1987, there were only two seaworthy Indians on the island. The 20-foot sailboats designed by master boat-builder John Alden were manufactured until 1927 and very popular for racing. The Indians, built from wood, were falling apart by the 1980s. Newhouse was given an old Indian from Aggie Poor, and he took it down to Florida, where his friend Dan Avoures made a much sturdier fiberglass mold of the hull. Over time, Newhouse transported 18 of the new models to Nantucket. Today there are more than 20 seaworthy Indians on Nantucket, 15 of which race.

Worden often sailed with Newhouse in the weekend races, right up through the beginning of last summer.

“At the end of the summer, with him not being well enough to sail much, we couldn’t race. So we watched the races from a Boston Whaler. When they were over, we’d get back to the Yacht Club, and be sitting at the bar, and he’d lean over to me and say ‘We would have had ’em today. Today would have been our day’,” Worden remembered. “He wasn’t upset at all that he couldn’t sail. He had fun just watching.”

On his first visit to the island in 1927, Newhouse’s parents signed he and his brother up for sailing lessons with local sailing legend Jack Walling, who later died while serving on a submarine that disappeared during World War II.

In 1932, Newhouse’s parents bought an Indian for he and his brother Edgar for $500. Alan and Edgar frequently raced the Indian in Nantucket Yacht Club events, and they often sailed to Martha’s Vineyard to participate in the Edgartown Regatta.

Newhouse met his first wife, Virginia Sharp, who was also a sailor, at the yacht club in 1937. They were married in 1943 and had four children together: Nancy, who lives on Nantucket; Jerry; Deborah and Christopher. Virginia died in 1997, and Newhouse married his wife Sondra in 1999.

Newhouse graduated from Princeton in 1941 and began working for the Alcoa Steamship Company in Weehawken, N.J. Eventually he left Alcoa and opened his own freight-forwarding business in Houston, Texas called Behring International.

In 1980, Newhouse sold his share of the company and retired to Nantucket. When Newhouse sold Behring, it had become the second largest freight-forwarding business in the country.

Shortly after his retirement, Newhouse bought a 40-foot motor sailboat he named The Whistler, and spent the next two years fishing out of Key West, Fla. with four other Nantucketers: Steve Marcoux, Nelson Joyce, Mark Duffield and Ray DeCosta.

When Newhouse returned to Nantucket after two years in the Keys, he converted the fish hold of The Whistler into accommodations and sailed from the island to Tampa, Fla. every year in the fall for the next 13 years. After a stop-over in Florida, he would sail further south to Caribbean destinations like Belize, Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras and the Bahamas, returning to the island every spring. Newhouse estimated he sailed over 60,000 miles aboard The Whistler before selling it in 1997.

The idea to create Nantucket Community Sailing was sparked by a sixth grade teacher named Suzanne Landers, who moved to Nantucket from Boston and was shocked that the island had no sailing program, Newhouse said at the time.

In 1995, he and nine other members founded the organization aimed at promoting recreational sailing among all ages and economic backgrounds. Six friends of the new program donated $5,000 each to purchase a fleet of six sailboats. Each boat was named after the donor or donor’s wife. The program took off from there and Community Sailing now has a fleet of over 100 sailboats at its disposal, with more than 700 children participating in the program every summer.

In 2005, Community sailing named its new boat-maintenance facility on Arrowhead Drive the Alan I. Newhouse Boathouse in his honor.

“It’s obviously a huge loss to the community of Nantucket,” Judson said. “He contributed to so many different organizations, people and things. For me, he was always very much a voice of reason. He was always an insightful individual. As its founder and supporting backbone, it’s obviously a huge loss for Community Sailing, but it goes much further. He had an impact on so many different people. He never sat still. He was always looking for the next fun project, the next thing that needed to be done.”

Funeral services will be held at 10 a.m. Thursday, Jan. 10 at Holy Cross Catholic Church in Vero Beach, followed by a reception at the Boathouse at the Quail Valley Golf Club in Vero Beach. A memorial service will be held on Nantucket this summer.

For more memories of Alan Newhouse, log on to www.ack.net, go to the Obituaries page, and click on Alan Newhouse’s Memory Book.

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